News (101)

This week Kris French and I visited the Burnley Campus at the University of Melbourne to talk to Rebecca Miller, Claire Fuller and Nick Williams about theirGreen Infrastructure research and to give seminars about our own research. Burnley has a prize winning roof garden (shown here) which incoroporates different substrates (soil substitutes) at different depths.

While I was at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham last year I met Juliet Coastes and Dan Gibbs who also work on mosses. Juliet and I have written a short article on why mosses are so cool which you can read on Ian Street's the Quiet Branches blog.

Just back from a visit to Perth, Western Australia for the United Nations Environment Programme Environmental Effects Assessment Panel (UNEP-EEAP). While we were there someone asked if the ozone hole was still there. The answer is very much so. It is predicted to recover by about 2060, but here is what it looked like last week and you can see all of Antarctica beneath it. So as we think about the Paris meeting and what we should do with greenhouse gases it is a useful reminder that we can act together and change things. In the 1980s we regulated CFC and other Ozone Depleting Substances. BUT once you mess with Earth's climate it takes a while to fix. So we need to get on with it.

You might think moss was just something we walk on but think again. Recent graduate Dr Jessica Bramley-Alves has written an article for the public about how we can use mosses to tell us how climates are changing in Antarctica. You can read the article here

Satellites provide a key method for measuring properties of the biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere on global scales. In particular, in recent years the detection and quantification of solar induced fluorescence (SIF) as a means to quantify plant growth and productivity has been a key goal of both NASA’s OCO-2 mission and the proposed European FLEX mission. However, the processes driving SIF are not fully understood.

Last Wednesday night we had a farewell dinner for Zbyněk Malenovský who is leaving the lab next week. He is going back to Europe for a holiday before starting a new job in the US. We will all miss him. He has been a great assett to the Antarctic and LIFT research over the past few years. We are hoping it is au revior and that we will continue to collaborate in the future.

Last week Melinda Waterman and Johanna Turnbull finished writing their PhD theses and submitted them for examination. So a big congratulations to both of them for getting through by the deadline. Writing a book is never easy and that is effectively what they have done. Now we just need to wait and see what the examiners have to say, but in the meantime they are both catching up on sleep and hopefully enjoying having their lives back.

It's been a busy week. Wednesday was the big day. Dr Jessica Bramley-Alves made a flying visit from Singapore to Graduate and to give her final PhD seminar. Jess managed to get history, science and modern culture into her talk on Antarctic moss demonstrating what an inter-disciplinary lot we are. Dr Ari Nugraha also graduated. Ari is an honorary member of the moss team having worked with Mel on moss pigment identification.

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PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong working on using LIFT (Light Induced Fluorescence Transience) for use in automated and remote sensing of plant photosynthetic activity. I operate a number of fixed and rotary-wing UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in my spare time for aerial photography. The eventual goal is to use UAVs to take LIFT measurements over large areas (crops and forest canopies).